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An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft founder Bill Gates has pledged to develop with Korea a revolutionary nuclear reactor that will leave far less radioactive waste than existing ones. Gates invested US$35 million in a nuclear-power venture company TerraPower in 2010. TerraPower is led by John Gilleland. It was formed from an effort initiated in 2007 by Nathan Myhrvold's company, Intellectual Ventures. The company includes expert staff and individual consultants who have worked for some of the most prestigious nuclear laboratories and engineering companies in the world." You may remember that Gates worked with China to build a reactor late last year.

As a general rule, if someone in the free world just says "Korea," they usually mean South Korea. It's one of those annoying namespace pollution games, like how "China" now always means mainland China, and never Taiwan (although that one's somewhat more understandable, since they have the chunk of territory called China, whereas the Republic of Korea only has half of the Korean peninsula.)

As a general rule, if someone in the free world just says "Korea," they usually mean South Korea. It's one of those annoying namespace pollution games...

That may be, but prepending "North" or "South" is so simple that very few people are lazy enough to drop it. In fact, I'm pretty sure this is the first time I've seen the term to refer to a country rather than the continent.

There are working communes around in North America. The ones I know of are small (1000 or so), and religiously conservative, high trust groups. Transparency is high, leadership is a calling (and more work than non-leadership, with few/no perks).

Personally, I think the size is a key issue, because the small size (and transparency) enable trust. Lack of trust is the big fail in communism. If your going to all share alike, you have to have some confidence that everyone else is contributing their best efforts, or your going to slack off yourself. Someone sees you slacking, and slacks (a little more?) themselves - its a downward spiral. The only way to combat the race to the bottom is to reform or boot the slackers. The key piece here is that slackers can't hide.

That's how communism fails in small groups, but do you really think the Soviet Union's economy collapsed because they were all lazy?

No, the real reason why communism fails in large scale is because it doesn't have a good decision making mechanism. A successful economy is an efficient economy: efficiency frees up resources to be used for other purposes. The capitalist system is one in which major decisions are made on a financial and monetary basis, i.e., the value and costs of any action can be quantified.

In any sort of command economy, there are political considerations; there are many examples of the Soviet Union making desperately bad economic decisions for political reasons. But there is a greater problem: under communism, optimal decision making is an intractable problem. The economic decision problem grows exponentially with population size.

But what about capitalism? Under capitalism the decision about whether, for example, to shut down a factory for upgrades and maintenance is economic, not political. But more importantly, financial markets operate as a clever information summarization mechanism which reduce the decision problem from exponential to polynomial.

No, communism doesn't fail because people are lazy. Communism fails because running an advanced society is - like most human endeavours - a lot harder than it looks. The devil is in the details, and oh boy are there a lot of details when you're trying to satisfy the needs of a hundred million people. A small fact that most political philosphers overlook.

NK doesn't even pretend to be communist these days. Apparently it wasn't such a good descriptor because none of the Kims invented the word, and so people could think that someone else was smarter than them or something; while in reality, of course, all revolutionary political thought that leads the great Korean people to their superior destiny only originates with the Kims. So now it's all about Juche and songun. They've even dropped all mentions of "communism" from their constitution in 2009.

Because there are no true Democracies in existence today, and often that term is used loosely to describe countries with some democratic principles. Meanwhile, there are many "democratic" dictatorship where the dictator is elected by a group of small party officials and therefore they are technically a democratically elected republic (as many of the SSR states were in the soviet era).

Then, while the Japanese were in Washington, in negotiation with the US on resolving the conflict peacefully, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor one Sunday morning. That afternoon, the Japanese ambassador delivered the declaration of war.

Along the way, there was the Bataan Death March (definitely genocide).

On Saipan, the US had translators and loudspeakers trying to convince the Japanese civilians that they would not be harmed. The Japanese military told them the Americans would kill them. They jumped off a cliff into the sea. Can you have genocide within the same racial group.

Before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we asked the Japanese to surrender. Sound of crickets as the Japanese, with their custom, killed the peace proposal with silence.

Then the B-29s were sent out, not with bombs, but risking flak, etc., to drop leaflets telling everyone in town to get out or face a new and powerful bomb. They chose to stay, working in the Mitsubishi Torpedo Works, the shipyards and other armaments plants.

After the first bomb, the US waited three days. Still the sound of crickets from the Imperial Palace.

So, your definition of genocide is striking back in force after an unprovoked attack? Interesting definition.

And, once the Japanese surrendered, we spent millions feeding their people. Genocide?

No genocide is when you try to systematically kill of a whole racial ethnic, or religious/political group. What happened in WWII against the people of japan was not genocide. We were at war and during war some civilians will died. that is the nature, unfortunately, of war. The US never tried to kill japans entire populous. We fought them until they surrendered. (If we had not the would have gone right back on the offensive.) Then we rebuilt their country. Had we been engaging in genocide we would not have stopped killing them. If you want to know what genocide is look at the other side of the war what happened in the Philippians and Manchuria. Or look over in Europe where the Germans most definitely pursued genocide killing any and all jews, roma, poles, gays, masons, J.W.'s, soviets, and serbs.

While I won't argue that Japan did some really terrible things (war crimes, crimes against humanity) I think it is important to understand that the average Japanese person was not generally supportive of those acts. Just like in Nazi Germany most of the population was tired of war and would not have supported mass slaughter had they known exactly what was happening and had the power to do anything about it.

Again, I am not arguing that what happened was wrong, I just want to point out that some of the events you describe were not quite how you pitch them. For example when the US told people to get out of Hiroshima they would have had to consider the possibility that the enemy was just lying in an attempt to harm their war effort and the fact that the government would have acted to prevent a mass exodus. There was also loyalty to Japan and the war effort to consider, no matter how misguided it was. Even the second time around in Nagasaki word of what happened in Hiroshima had not exactly been publicised or explained to most Japanese people. Remember there was no TV and all radio and newspaper output was censored or written by the government anyway, and they were not keen on rumours of this new weapon spreading. My point is just that the civilians didn't "choose to stay" in the face of nuclear attack.

Similarly the attack of Pearl Harbour was an act of desperation by the Japanese. They didn't want to enter a war with the US because they knew it would be extremely difficult to win, and they had to consider the likely possibility of other nations attacking them too from the west. If you look at the records of what the Japanese government was doing at the time it is clear that there was much dissent over Pearl Harbour, and the feeling that surrender was inevitable well before the atomic bombs were dropped. In fact some argued that it would be better to negotiate a surrender earlier, before unconditional surrender was forced on them. As it happens McArthur was the right man to accept the surrender and allow Japan to keep some of its dignity, which I can't commend him enough for.

War is rarely black and white. The Japanese people were as much victims of their government as anyone else. Plus the alternative to not helping them after the war would have been to create another post-WWI Germany.

Not so. Wikipedia, Surrender of Japan will give you some insight. I have also run across a diary account of one of the Imperial cabinet staff documenting the discussions of the cabinet in those 3 days. Japan had two seperate nuclear bomb initiatives running, so they understood the concept and capability (generally) already. The cabinet's concerns were:

1) we can still bargain for a better cease-fire/surrender agreement (by inflicting heavy casualties on the Americans).2) we can get the still-neutral US

RTFA dude (yes, I know, this is/. where nobody RTFAs) The reactor is designed to produce significantly LESS waste than existing designs. the problem is that getting permits for experimental reactors in the US is even harder than getting one for a known reactor design. We have hobbled ourselves in the Nuclear power area, indeed in ALL power areas due to our extreme fear of all things nuclear. (Despite living on a radioactive mostly molten ball with a thin hard crust orbiting around a giant fusion reaction in space as we get bombarded with interstellar radiation.)

Maybe you should read up on fast reactors [nationalcenter.org] - a fast reactor is not necessarily also a breeder; a light water reactor breeds plutonium whether you want it to or not.

Also, the plutonium IFRs make is _less_ useful for weapons:"... plutonium-bearing material taken from anywhere in the IFR cycle was so ornery, because of inherent heat, radioactivity and spontaneous neutrons, that making a bomb with it without chemical separation of the plutonium would be essentially impossible - far, far harder than using today'

Yes, much better to have it so heavily regulated that it can't be moved at all, and they store it all on site forever and ever until you have a 50 meter tall pile of nuclear waste, then containment fails, and it all falls into the river, killing everyone and everything downstream. Yeah, too bad we didn't allow LFTRs to be built, which would have consumed all that shit as fuel, leaving only useful isotopes as waste.

I assume US regulation is far too extreme to pursue such ventures. Gates can get more bang for his buck in a country where it doesn't take 20 years just to get approval to move forward.

Kind of. SFRs are about 50 years old, even in the USA. We have, err, had, about a half dozen of them. Those crazy soviets put them in subs which they promptly set on fire and sunk. Its old icky tech. No one wants them if they can use a PWR or BWR design instead. The latest spin is to try to market them as something new even though they aren't new. Just like IT, everything old is eventually new again, and sometimes it even works. SFRs are the "cloud computing" of nuclear engineering.

For non-nuke noobs, a SFR is just like any other reactor except:

1) The coolant is sodium instead of water, so its hyper flammable and this scares the hell out of everyone involved, so every plant has had excellent safety and production records, well, except for the ones that caught fire.

2) Ditto above water is neutron activated for "a couple seconds" so other than impurities / leakage into the coolant, the coolant is basically radioactively harmless, however sodium does neutron activate and takes a couple days for enough half lifes to pass before its harmless (radioactively). Note I'm talking about the coolant itself not impurities or leakage into the coolant which is unchanged, more or less. So thats a bit freaky. You can draw PWR/BWR primary loop coolant and by they time it flows thru the "just in case" filters its cool enough to dump directly into the sewers. Sodium takes a bit longer and dumping it into the sewers is not exactly encouraged behavior, although I'm sure its terribly entertaining.

3) Other than being flammable and radioactive, sodium is a near ideal coolant. You won't have corrosion issues like hot high pressure water. Endless stories about 20 year old pumps being pulled out of service and appearing to be brand new. Although there were some "hilarious" near disasters with eutectic alloy formation and that was all figured out 40 years ago.

4) Sodium solidifies into a solid lump at room temp. This is kind of an issue for operational concerns. OK time to boot up the reactor, pull the control rods. Oh wait, they're frozen in place. Well then. And once you fix that and get the reactor cooking, the pumps are jammed so you've got to heat them.

5) Vapor pressure at operating temp is basically nil, at least compared to water. So the reactor vessel is more or less unpressurized (well yeah you blow argon over it instead of room air, but... its just a argon blanket not 1000 psi steam like PWRs / BWRs) So all this fukushima splitting open stuff is not really relevant. Of course if you did split one in half it would be the end of the freaking world...

6) The "overheat leads to high temp chemical reaction with cladding leads to H2 buildup leads to kaboom" aka fukishima is literally chemically impossible. "unplug" a SFR like happened in Japan and basically nothing happens it just inherently calms itself down and eventually will freeze itself solid. Crazy but true. Isn't nuclear engineering cool that way? PWR and BWR to some extent or another will try to blow themselves up if abandoned so you engineer "fail safe" by making them really tough, but an abandoned SFR just kinda sits there all hot at a constant temperature and does nothing. Its kind of boring that way. Until the local fire department decides to hose it down with fire hoses. Sodium doesn't like water very much. Err actually red hot sodium likes water a lot, its just the nearby humans that dislike the fireball.

Fukushima didn't just fail because it was unplugged, there was also earthquake damage to some of the cooling system and a critical valve. Details are still emerging as the plant is explored, but basically I hope they don't have big earthquakes in South Korea. Leaking radioactive sodium coolant doesn't sound like fun.

Fukushima didn't just fail because it was unplugged, there was also earthquake damage to some of the cooling system and a critical valve.

As long as the reactor vessel is intact, no leaks, then a SFR will just sit there and do nothing rather than blow up fukushima style. Shut 'er down and walk away safe, like I said..

That is not to say you couldn't design a SFR almost intentionally to be not "walk away safe". I'm sure a moron could implement a drain valve thats only closed when power is applied to it, or a fire sprinker that only shuts off water flow while power is applied, etc. But at a nuclear / thermodynamic / chemistry level SFRs can j

While liquid sodium is no one's idea of a fun material to work with, there are a couple of things you're not quite accurate on.

The big one is why you think the coolant might be in contact with the control rods.

You also don't mention that the shutdown/restart cycle is much simple due to the relative lack of iodine poisoning, the amount of energy extracted from the fuel is much higher, and the amount of long-lived waste produced is much smaller.

I assume US regulation is far too extreme to pursue such ventures. Gates can get more bang for his buck in a country where it doesn't take 20 years just to get approval to move forward.

Glad you made it clear that it is only an assumption you have.

The real reason is obvious - South Korea has no native or cheap sources of energy (like natural gas) and has a government sponsored development corporation (KOPEC) to develop and build nuclear power plants, which already supply 45% of the nation's electricity.

In the U.S. nuclear power plants have to compete with cheap natural gas plants, which on straight-up business investment grounds they routinely lose out. To overcome the financial handicap n

What would China look like today if they had the Clean Air and Water Act? They would still be a land composed of 99% rural peasants starving and scraping away at the land. You can't support environmental regulation until you have an industrial base. Nevermind the amount of regulation on the nuclear industry, which is so severe that nothing can be done at all, except for concentration of more and more nuclear waste on site until something goes *pop* and everybody dies. Thanks regulation!

Also, the Obama administration attempted to block further Uranium mining

Citation needed. I just googled it and all I found was that uranium mining would not be allowed on Federal lands in Arizona, i.e. the Grand Canyon. This is a far cry from the universal ban you claimed or implied.

South Korea is officially at war with a country that owns nuclear weapons. There are racks of gas masks in subways in Seoul in case of surprise chemical attack and Kim's artillery pieces are at 10 km of its center (well within range). I think that the remote possibility of a slight nuclear pollution is less of a concern for them, yes. When you are used to live with shells pointed at one minute from your head, people who say that nuclear reactors are an intolerable risk seem a little over-the -top.

I really appreciate that someone is working on advancing nuclear energy. Oil and gas are fine for now, but eventually we will need reliable non-oil/gas based energy solution. I believe nuclear, once sufficiently mature, could be that alternative.

Maybe we're reading a different thread but I haven't seen any "MS sniping". My question is this: when you say "somebody is working on nuclear power", am I to believe that BG and his team are the only people actually working on the state of the art in reactors? Because without knowing I'd say that is absolutely fucking absurd.

MS sniping? The involvement of Intellectual Ventures, a scumbag patent troll, is far more interesting. IV distinguish themselves by not just buying up patent portfolios, but also assembling think tanks to come up with the next obvious human activity "but on the internet" or "but with 1 click" to lay claim to. In this case however, it seems they are funding some actual, practical research.

Sniping aside, I'd be more interested in someone making a bid to develop a practical Thorium based MSR. This SFR reactor is supposedly an advanced gen IV design. How safe are these things considered to be?

I mean, we can probably guess which Korea they're referring to here, but last time I checked, they hadn't been reunified yet. I really hope that Bill Gates isn't building a nuclear reactor for North Korea.

Building a modern reactor with less radioactive by-products in North Korea would be great. It will help to the people by getting rid of their energy problems and will not be usable to create the components necessary for nuclear weapons.

That would only be true if North Korea's government actually cared about its people. What would actually happen is that the nuclear generator would be used to power the lights in Pyongyang while the rest of the country would be left to starve.

A lot of people would just sit on their fortunes (Warren Buffet) or piss it away on political bullshit (Koch brothers). I know a lot of the crowd here is anti-Microsoft, but it's nice to see Bill Gates doing something with his hoard and something halfway-geeky to boot!

A lot of people would just sit on their fortunes (Warren Buffet) or piss it away on political bullshit (Koch brothers). I know a lot of the crowd here is anti-Microsoft, but it's nice to see Bill Gates doing something with his hoard and something halfway-geeky to boot!

Yeah The Oracle from Omaha should give away large chunks of his wealth to philanthropic causes. Oh wait . .. [givingpledge.org]

Warren Buffett is giving 10% of his wealth to the Gates Foundation every year, and has done other philanthropic work. He's never had plans to give it to his children. And he's done a pretty decent job of managing his wealth without harming the average workers at his companies.

Why does anyone need nuclear power? Solar salt thermal plants can do baseload electricity already. There's a proposal to convert Australia to 100% solar thermal/0 carbon emissions in a 10 year time frame and it only costs $400 Billion. That completely eliminates our greenhouse gas issues. http://www.http//beyondzeroemissions.org [www.http] Nuclear/Oil/Gas really are dead end Technologies. We should be conserving nuclear resources for long-haul space travel instead of burning our only real means off this rock.

Indeed; I've had people point out 'Japan's running just fine having shut down ALL their nuclear plants!'. Just recently I read an article* that pointed out that the cost of the oil and natural gas to replace their nuclear plants pushed Japan into a trade deficit for the first time in decades. Now, it didn't have a mention of cost, and the global downturn probably plays a factor, but I found an estimate of $100M/day [thehindu.com], 4.5M barrels of oil. Since Oil is pretty price-inflexible, that 4.5M barrels of oil is coming out of the rest of the world - raising the price of our gasoline, diesel, and other petroleum products.

Not the most impartial site, but it quotes $55B [world-nuclear-news.org] in additional fossil fuel imports. It actually says the shutdowns were a bigger cause than all the damage from the Earthquake & Tsunami.

For those worried about global warming - Green energy isn't ramping up to replace the nuclear power lost anytime soon, and it's led to a substantial increase in Japan's CO2 emissions. Right now Japanese consumers oppose turning the plants back on; but last I heard they're also not seeing an increase in their electric bill yet.

Last report I saw said that Japan's carbon emissions are up 17% over last year and that includes a period when many of their nuclear reactors were still running. TEPCO has announced a 9% increase in domestic electricity prices starting in September this year, to cover the cost of the coal and oil imports needed to generate electricity that was previously produced by the nuclear stations.

Two Japanese reactors at Ohi restarted recently, generating about 2.4GW baseload, that is day and night. Another reactor in Shikoku might restart before winter but the rest are still shut down and will be until the panic is over.

My "one true power" goal would be 150% nuclear with the extra power being used to produce liquid fuels from atmospheric CO2 for mobile and transport needs.

RE: extra power being used to produce liquid fuels from atmospheric CO2 for mobile and transport needs.

You can't do that!The arctic would freeze and we'd miss out on wicked storms like Katrina.Shipping lanes in the Arctic are about to open up and hopefully some wars will occur because right-of-way, etc. Wars and storm cleanup are highly profitable./S

The point about Japan is that people were saying we would go back to the stone age without nuclear, but that didn't happen. In fact there has been a bit of a boost due to people buying new energy efficient appliances to help reduce power consumption. Remember that threat of rolling blackouts this summer? It was removed because people met the challenges, all without reverting to an agrarian society or even reducing their quality of life in any measurable way.

I remember that even months after most Japanese reactors were offline there was a story on/. about more European countries deciding to go nuclear free. Some comment about them going back to the stone age was modded +5 informative. Well, that guy and everyone who modded him up has been proven wrong. I'm not saying it hasn't had an affect on Japan, a big affect, but it wasn't the cataclysmic disaster many predicted.

Now, given a decade or two to slowly reduce dependency and move to non-nuclear sources like other countries are I'd argue that not only will there be little or no pain, there will be huge gains as well. Japan in particular is blessed with more than enough renewable energy for the entire country, it just needs to be tapped and the nuclear industry is very powerful.

Show me a single Solar Salt Thermal plant running in production. Or even one that is almost in production, running anywhere near the power capacities of even these 'little' nuclear power plants. (let alone the Gigawatts of some of the big boys)

BTW, your "only 400 billion" is a bit crazy.. The US has around 100 Reactors producing about 1/3 of our nations power. At an average replacement cost of about $2billion (each) last I heard. So for that same money, you could move 2/3 of the US to nuclear.. and the land mass used to generate it would be significantly smaller.

There is no single solution, and I wish people would stop claiming there is.. Moving all of any country to any single power source is plain foolishness.. its going to take a mix of wind, solar, nuclear, hydro, wave power, etc to properly diversify and meet the power needs.

I have never claimed thorium reactors are running in production, much less that an entire country could switch over to it as its sole means of energy production.

However, the Canadian CANDU reactors are designed to run on several kinds of fuel, including thorium. I don't know if they are using it now, but it is designed. http://www.nuclearfaq.ca/brat_fuel.htm [nuclearfaq.ca]

But I guess I'm the idot:)

Wow, I'm backing up claims I never made with less than a min of googling!

Solar anything isn't a realistic power solution for any part of the world where you get less than 8 hours of sunlight per day for several months straight. Also anyone who lives in a cold climate can tell you that using electricity to heat buildings is horribly inefficient compared to using natural gas or oil.

Not every place can rely on solar power. Those that can't may have to rely on very long transmission lines which may not be practical. If you live in Las Vegas, solar salt thermal is practical with its 200+ days of sunshine [worldfactsandfigures.com] whereas Seattle only has 71 days. In terms of constant power generation, fossil fuels and nuclear are really the most reliable and can be used anywhere.

Yes it does use hydro. But try to site a new dam for a hydroelectric power plant.

I find it hypocritical for the environmental movement to cite hydro-electric as an example of successful renewable energy in support of non hydro renewables when they've historically fought any new dams tooth and nail.

That would be great but in the real world... we know how companies rarely ever pass their savings back down to the customers. So I would say don't expect to see any cut in your montly bill and it is more likely that you will have a license fee added on if Nathan is involved and that license fee will be passed on to the customers.

... are microsoft getting into the refinement of uranium/plutonium as a way to avoid patent litigation from Apple/Samsung/Google over the surface?

"We raise your patent for 'a small button on the device front, that allows the user to turn it on', with two 8Kg blocks of plutonium-239, which we shall now hand to your lawyers as one big block, whilst running away very, very, quickly..... ".

"...and just so that we all know what we're talking about, I've brought some of this stuff with me. Two bars, ladies and gentlemen, of weapons-grade plutonium. A lethal dose at 20 yards! Get it while it's hot!" -- Jedburgh, Edge of Darkness.

Funny that, I always thought that Grogan (the villain) looked like Bill Gates.

It's a really cool idea if you can get it to work. It breeds fuel right before it burns it. So you can load the thing once and have it run for 50 years without refueling. It's nice because you don't have to have move large amounts of enriched uranium or plutonium around.

Mr. Gates gave a rather insightful and intelligent discussion of this problem at a recent Ted Talks [google.com]. He makes a pretty solid point that some kind of nuclear power is our only way out of the carbon-destroying-the-earth problem.

Honestly, when was the last time you got a blue screen of death? Honestly?

I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy - well no, come to think of it, I don't hate them anymore, they're like the nasty grandmother who's gotten old and invalid and you feel vaguely sorry for now - but quite frankly they've gotten good at making stable operating systems.